Hi -

this is a comment/question about a particular discovery system
(Summon), but perhaps of more general interest. It's not intended as
flamebait or criticism of the vendor or people associated with it.

When integrating Summon into LibX (which works quite nicely btw,
gratuitous screenshot is attached to this email) I found myself amazed
by the multitude of possible fields and combinations returned in the
resulting records. For instance, some records contains fields 'url'
(lower case), and/or 'URL' (upper case), and/or 'URI' (upper case).
Which one to display, and how?  For instance, some records contain an
OPAC URL in the 'url' field, and a ToC link in the URI field. Why?

Similarly, the date associated with a record can come in a variety of
formats. Some are single-field (20080901), some are abbreviated
(200811), some are separated into year, month, date, etc.  Some
records have a mixture of those.

My question is how do other adopters of Summon, or of emerging
discovery systems that provide direct access to their records in
general, deal with the roughness of the records being returned?  Are
there best practices in how to extract information from them, and in
how to prioritize relevant and weed out irrelevant or redundant
information?

 - Godmar